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Roderick Williams’ and Julius Drake’s English Winter Journey seems such a perfect concept that one wonders why no one had previously thought of compiling a sequence of 24 songs by English composers to mirror, complement and discourse with Schubert’s song-cycle of love and loss.

Opening night at the Metropolitan is a gleeful occasion even when the
composer is long gone, but December 1st was an opening for a living composer who
has been making waves around the world and is, gasp, a woman — the second woman
composer ever to have an opera presented at the Met.

The Feast at Solhaug : Henrik Ibsen's play Gildet paa Solhaug (1856) inspired Wilhelm Stenhammer's opera Gillet på Solhaug. The world premiere recording is now available via Sterling CD, in a 3 disc set which includes full libretto and background history.

For an opera that has never quite made it over the threshold into the ‘canonical’, the adolescent Mozart’s La finta giardiniera has not done badly of late for productions in the UK. In 2014, Glyndebourne presented Frederic Wake-Walker’s take on the eighteen-year-old’s dramma giocoso. Wake-Walker turned the romantic shenanigans and skirmishes into a debate on the nature of reality, in which the director tore off layers of theatrical artifice in order to answer Auden’s rhetorical question, ‘O tell me the truth about love’.

Heading to N.Y.C and D.C. for its annual performances, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra invited Semyon Bychkov to return for his Mahler debut with the Fifth Symphony. Having recently returned from Vienna with praise for their rendition, the orchestra now presented it at their homebase.

Igor Stravinsky's lost Funeral Song, (Chante funèbre) op 5 conducted by Valery Gergiev at the Mariinsky in St Petersburg This extraordinary performance was infinitely more than an ordinary concert, even for a world premiere of an unknown work.

On Tuesday evening this week, I found myself at The Actors Centre in London’s Covent Garden watching a performance of Unknowing, a dramatization of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben and Dichterliebe (in a translation by David Parry, in which Matthew Monaghan directed a baritone and a soprano as they enacted a narrative of love, life and loss. Two days later at the Wigmore Hall I enjoyed a wonderful performance, reviewed here, by countertenor Philippe Jaroussky with Julien Chauvin’s Le Concert de la Loge, of cantatas by Telemann and J.S. Bach.

Here is one of the next new great conductors. That’s a bold statement,
but even the L.A. Times agrees: Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s appointment
“is the biggest news in the conducting world.” But Ms. Mirga
Gražinytė-Tyla will be getting a lot of weight on her shoulders.

Macabre and moonstruck, Schubert as Goth, with Stuart Jackson, Marcus Farnsworth and James Baillieu at the Wigmore Hall. An exceptionally well-planned programme devised with erudition and wit, executed to equally high standards.

On November 20, 2016, Arizona Opera completed its run of Antonín Dvořák’s fairy Tale opera, Rusalka. Loosely based on Hand Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, Joshua Borths staged it with common objects such as dining room chairs that could be found in the home of a child watching the story unfold.

If there was ever any doubt that Puccini’s Manon is on a road to nowhere, then the closing image of Jonathan Kent’s 2014 production of Manon Lescaut (revived here for the first time, by Paul Higgins) leaves no uncertainty.

Many opera singers are careful to maintain an air of political neutrality. Not so mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who is outspoken about causes she holds dear. Her latest project, a very personal response to the 2015 terror attacks in Paris, puts her audience through the emotional wringer, but also showers them with musical rewards.

I wonder if Karl Amadeus Hartmann saw something of himself in the young Simplicius Simplicissimus, the eponymous protagonist of his three-scene chamber opera of 1936. Simplicius is in a sort of ‘Holy Fool’ who manages to survive the violence and civil strife of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), largely through dumb chance, and whose truthful pronouncements fall upon the ears of the deluded and oppressive.

For its second opera of the 2016-17 season Lyric Opera of Chicago has staged Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in a production seen at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Grand Théâtre de Genève.

Reviews

01 Dec 2009

No need to rise for this Hallelujah Chorus

ENO did not exactly ‘import a choir of Heathens’ to encourage the Shaws of this world to ‘hasten’ to its version of ‘Messiah’ ‘if only to witness the delight of the public and the discomfiture of the critics,’ the contribution of ‘Heathens’ in musical terms being limited to representing the populace of an initially grey Britain (or so I assume) but for every critic who was discomfited — most of us — there were hundreds of audience members who loved it, so it’s fairly safe to predict a considerable hit.

It was famously said of Mrs Cibber that for her singing of ‘He was despised,’ all her sins should be forgiven, and I can forgive a lot of directorial sins for Catherine Wyn-Rogers’ deeply moving, absolutely committed performance, and for John Mark Ainsley’s characteristic skill in making fluent musical sounds whilst having to perform undignified acts. Sophie Bevan also had a lot to contend with in that ‘Rejoice Greatly’ was taken a little too fast for her, and she had to perform ‘I know that my Redeemer Liveth’ lying flat on a bed, something which no singer ought to be asked to do — those of us familiar with the Glyndebourne ‘Theodora’ will recall how Dawn Upshaw and David Daniels were similarly encumbered at the moment of their deaths, but there it was deeply moving as opposed to annoying, and at least they didn’t have to rise again and don an M&S cardigan. I found it less easy to forgive Brindley Sherratt’s blustery singing — ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’ was off key and lacking in grandeur.

And did those trumpets sound for us? Did we, despite being committed Atheists, find ourselves saying ‘Wow, maybe there is something to all this religion stuff after all?’ Well, no — but we sometimes do just that after hearing ‘Messiah’ in the concert hall. Handel himself said that whilst composing the Hallelujah chorus, he felt ‘as if I saw God on his throne, and all his angels about him.’ All I felt here was the same sense of embarrassment I experience at the end of one of those services where everyone has to shake hands. The ENO chorus seemed somewhat subdued overall, and needless to say I Ioathed the drippy dancing.

Does it work? Musically, yes, and you would expect no less from Laurence Cummings’ ever-dynamic command of the orchestra, but the staging seemed too calculated to appeal to the ‘Christmas-addict.’ Of course, it’s a Christmas show, and if it brings in people who don’t know ‘Messiah’ then it will have achieved much, but somehow I had expected more from Deborah Warner: her concept of the kind of grey workaday world of which the poet wrote ‘So many, I had not thought death had undone so many’ being transformed by the suffering and death of Christ was a bit too ‘happy-clappy’ for me, and the Christmas-card images seemed trivialized. As for the child who kept running about to no discernible effect, I could have cheerfully shot the little tyke, adorable though he was. Jean Kalman’s lighting, as so often in this house and up the road, illuminated the stage with the most poetic sensibility.

Catherine Wyn-Rogers [Photo by Robert Workman courtesy of English National Opera]

Should you go? Well of course you should — you’ll hear some genuine Handelian singing and playing, and you’ll experience one of the great masterpieces in a new and occasionally refreshing light — just don’t expect to be as moved as you were by the same director’s ‘St John Passion,’ and be prepared to put up with a few squirm-inducing moments.